Abstract
This book is recommended to anyone studying media discourse and language ideologies. It adopts a new focus to discuss a range of issues on language ideologies and media discourse. It is a new attempt to continue the concepts and views previously presented in earlier collections. It explores the functions of language in a wider range of socio-cultural, geographical and media-technological contexts.
The main argument of the book is the media as discursive space for examining language ideological debates. It exemplifies how language can be used to resolve struggles in a legitimate way, without necessarily stirring up tensions or anxieties among the involved social actors. As such, the book skillfully examines a range of linguistic means that could be used to involve the intended audience in the production, circulation and reception of the intended discourse. It explores the ways in which media discourse could help to overcome communicative incompetencies or linguistic diversities, which could result in greater social unity.
The book adopts language and ideology as a framework to investigate the link between ‘social forms and forms of talk’. The rationale for such an investigation is that languages are not equal in real-world socio-linguistic environments, and the prime objective is
to show how linguistic phenomena are invested with meanings and values through the production, reproduction and/or contestation of conventional indexical ties between [i] perceived or presumed features, genres, styles or varieties of language and [ii] broader cultural representations of their purported speakers in terms of nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, morality and so forth. (p. 4)
The book begins with an introductory chapter providing an overview of the issues presented in the following chapters, which are classified into four parts, each with three articles of relatively similar topics. Part I, ‘Standards and standardization in national and global contexts’, discusses the role of national press and broadcast media on ‘proper’ language. Chapter 2 contrasts prescriptive discourse with descriptive discourse. Chapter 3 examines ‘the way in which language ideologies are present in Spanish print media’ (p. 41), using articles from two of Spain’s leading daily newspapers. Chapter 4 analyzes two game shows on the theme of language transmitted on a national television channel in Korea. The shows are examples of ‘how the tension between globalization and nationalism is addressed by media institutions’ (p. 75).
Part II, ‘Planning and policy in media programming’, looks at language use on television with more attention to conditions and constraints of broadcasting. Chapter 5 analyzes two television shows catering for the Brazilian diaspora in an attempt to explore the constraints imposed on such programs by a monoglot ideology. Chapter 6 pictures the changing conditions that media publishers in Cyprus are experiencing as a result of socio-economic developments. It examines ‘the relationship between language practices, policies and television representations in the context of the current media landscape in Cyprus’ (p. 102). Chapter 7 examines the way in which ‘non-standard’ public usage of Singlish took precedence over the more prestigious Singapore English to perform a particular function in the National Campaign against SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) supervised by the Singapore government in 2003.
Part III, ‘Media, ethnicity and the racialization of language’, examines the way in which the relationship between linguistic phenomena and other social issues has developed. Chapter 8 examines two political texts broadcast on BBC1 in 2006/7 that reported on public spending on translation services for linguistic minorities who use Britain’s public services. The author is interested in discourse issues that connect the two news items with other political and media discourses on minority groups who speak languages other than English. The broadcasting and analysis of such political texts are mainly rooted in the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001 and on London in 2005, which raised questions about multiculturalism in Britain and other immigration states. Such discourse presupposes that the use of minority languages is not only associated with social problems but also serves as a barrier in learning English. Hence, minority languages other than English are presented as harmful to a cohesive society.
Chapter 9 continues the issue of language and race further by examining a television show called Celebrity Big Brother. In this show, the participants have no access to the outside world, and, conversely, the outside world has no access to them. The author wants to know ‘how the media constructed events without access to the participants’ (p. 165). In Chapter 10, the debate shifts from race to ethnicity by investigating a set of linguistic representations in the national press and on the internet and radio in Germany. The author looks for mechanisms of language ideology in German news reports on ethnolects – the language of speakers of migrant descent across north-western Europe. The author targets the semiotic processes through which certain linguistic features that are said to be ‘deviant’ from ‘standard’ German are the icons of ethnic speakers; that is their age and ethnicity as minority groups.
Part IV, ‘Language ideologies and new-media technologies’, adopts a critical view toward the ‘new’ media and their position in relation to language ideology. Chapter 11 examines prevailing communicative patterns within the spoken, written and multimodal discourse of virtual gaming environments because this could reveal underlying language ideologies. It addresses the usage of Received Pronunciation and standard North American as opposed to the non-standard accent of English. The use of ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ accents in computer games produces stereotypical images of their speakers in relation to morality, social class, gender and race. Chapter 12 analyzes the home page of the BBC ‘voices project’, which was intended to publically ‘celebrate’ linguistic diversity in the UK. The home page serves to ‘materialize an ideology of linguistic diversity through representations of the UK as a set of happy and highly diverse speaking communities on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, age and locality’ (p. 246). Chapter 13 explores the way in which technological changes are accompanied by transformations in communicative interaction. The data exemplifies the accessibility difficulties and communicative incompetencies involved in dealing with new technologies, as people have variable access to the production, circulation and reception of such technology.
Finally, the concluding chapter is an ‘epilogue’ with useful insights related to language ideologies and media discourse. It explores the way in which linguistic issues of the media can help to obtain a better view of socio-cultural changes happening in ‘late modernity’.
The book proves to be a very useful attempt to enrich the literature on construction, reproduction and modification of language ideologies by focusing on technological artifacts of late-modern society such as the newspaper and the telephone. The book offers valuable examples for referring to the function of language as a unifying or dividing social phenomenon depending on the way it is treated. Proper arrangement of media discourse, for example, can contribute to social unity, while mismanagement of discoursal issues may result in anxiety and social diversity. Language, in this sense, can be a very sensitive issue in multi-ethnic communities with people from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. With proper management, many societies have already benefited from language as a strong unifying force.